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Most of the Time, the World is Flat

Our struggle with economic equality has many roots. For starters, we have the dual affirmation of the values of liberty and equality, something Tocqueville noted as perhaps the key tension in modern democracies. Modern democracies also elevate the status of the individual choice much more highly than traditional societies. This honoring of the individual adds fuel to the free market, which ultimately seeks to commodify our choices. We will likely see laws supporting “traditional” morality, such as those against gambling and certain kinds of drug use, get removed from the books. I read with dismay this article, which indicates that Washington state now allows one to commodify the womb.

The multiplication of choices in the market dovetails with additional freedoms for the individual, and of course we generally want and desire such freedoms. But we cannot have such freedoms and have economic equality at the same time.

The roots of this trend towards an absolute market of things, and even using oneself as an economic object, has origins that predate modern democracies. To have an unending market of things we need to first have control over things, and to establish control the thing must be emptied of its own significance that we might fill it. In his A Secular Age, Charles Taylor observes that it is the homogenization of time and space that makes the modern era (ca. 18th century-today) possible, for it allows us to give our own meanings to our experiences. We can add that our perception of things as mere objects contributes to this trend.

Marcel Mauss’ book The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies poses many questions, such as, “Do books with absurdly boring titles, written by French sociologists, have an inverse or complimentary relationship with the inevitable nerdiness and pomposity of those that read such books?” Sure, having this book in front of you at your local Starbucks will likely make you look like a prig, but for those willing to assume the risk, Mauss has some interesting nuggets to reveal about the economies of the ancient world.

The societies Mauss surveys have an economy, but not ones we might expect. Some minor differences exist between the societies he examines across time and space, but in the main we can say that:

One can never truly own a thing, because the thing (be it a gold coin, a chair, a paddle) has an identity all its own. It is its “own” (ha!) thing before it ever was “your” thing.

One should not keep anything for too long. To do so would risk courting vengeance of a sort from thing itself (some societies had a more magical view of this, some abstracted it a bit more), which “longs” to go to someone else. Our stuff wants to roam wild and free.

One could potentially amass even a great surplus of things, but in end, everyone needed to give things to others and keep the cycle of exchange moving.* This was not mere self-emptying or even generosity per se, because all acknowledged that receiving a gift came with reciprocal responsibilities and burdens.** Failure to reciprocate courted disaster.

Of course these societies had a hierarchy, determined by birth or honorific achievements, or something else, but material wealth got passed around with much more fluidity in the ancient world than today. We may admire this, but quite frankly, we could never replicate it. For starters, we no longer see the world of things as full of meaning. As Taylor observed, in a world of homogeneity only we ourselves can transmit this meaning to things. Again, the concept of magic enters in with some of the early societies, but Mauss delineates between magic and some form of “embodied meaning.” I did not find him terribly clear on this point, but it is a hard concept to describe (and for me to understand). Something has to do with the idea that in the societies Mauss describes one more directly experiences the world. This too is hard to describe, but I would venture that

Today we assume that a thing has no meaning in itself. So its meaning must be mediated or transmitted by layers of society and the self.

Whereas “back then,” our experience of the world and the meaning of the world were one and the same.

We might catch a glimpse of this difference by looking a a different issue.

About four years ago Jonathan Pageau wrote a series of articles about ancient cosmology, and gave his first post the intriguing title, “Most of the Time the World is Flat.” Pageau obviously does not mean to imply that the Earth is not really round, and of course the earth does not change its shape. Rather, he postulates a significant disconnect between what we believe the world/cosmos to actually be like and our everyday experience of it. Science has not given us, and perhaps cannot give us, a workable, experiential model of the world. So we live divided, having to import a meaning to our experience that has no solid reality behind it. He writes,

I would like to propose something that might seem provocative at first, but will hopefully help people see the world with different eyes. There is a growing image on the recent horizon of human experience, it is an image of a family or a group of friends all next to each other at a table or in some other intimate setting, yet all interacting with tablets, ipods and smartphones as if the people around them didn’t exist. I would like to propose that this image, this reality is the final result of Galileo’s cosmological model. Some of you might think I am exaggerating, so I will need to explain.

The Copernican/Galilean worldview, that is the heliocentric worldview and its further development into our modern cosmology of galaxies and nebulas and black holes has two important aspects. It is an artificial vision and it is an alienating vision. It is artificial in the strictest sense of “art” or “techne”. It is a technical vision because we cannot experience this vision without technology, without telescopes and other apparatuses. Because technology is a supplementary thing, a garment of skin, something which we add to our natures in order to physically bolster them toward the material world, it therefore also leads further into the material world itself. (emphasis mine).

. . . modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in. When at the very core of vision, the shape of your cosmos leads you to believe that technology provides a perception which is more true, more real than your experience, more real than walking out of your house and looking at the sky, then the telescope and the microscope will soon be side by side with the camera, the screen and the accelerated time and space of the car window. The metal and glass frame will swallow us and human beings will lose themselves for their incapacity to fully inhabit the world.

Pageau knows that his desired task of reorienting our perspective will likely fail, with a gulf too broad for us to comprehend. Still, I encourage you to read the whole article here and try for yourself.^

It is the strict materialization of our things that creates the gulf between us and our things, which then means we cannot access the economies of the past.

If we wish to regain access to this world, we need a different conception of reality itself. We should take care and not romanticize this version of society. Mauss points out that violence existed in these societies–though probably not because of stark material inequality. The societies he describes sometimes had huge surpluses, which they then sometimes consumed in spectacular fashion. On the other hand, rarely did these societies have much of the technological innovation that we would appreciate. But, if we wish to access this way of life, we need to stop treating the inanimate things we create and consume as mere means to an end. Indeed, we often treat others as a means to an end as part of our contribution to a fallen world. Unfortunately, as the new surrogacy law in Washington state reveals, we are now so completely alienated even from our selves that we will cannibalize our own bodies as a means to an end for ourselves–a bifurcation that puts us far from the world Mauss describes.

“Man is what he eats.” Alexander Schemmann began his classic For the Life of the World quoting this epigram of Fuerbach. One might assume that an Orthodox priest would disagree with this radically materialist statement, but Schemmann turns the quote on its head and argues that with this quote Fuerbach, “expressed the most religious idea of man.” Mere matter does not exist, at least in the way we usually think. Perhaps the place to begin is with the eucharist, for it is here that symbol and reality fuse together most profoundly, and it is here that the world’s transformation begins anew.

Dave

*This reminds a bit of the modern economic idea that money must circulate through society like blood must circulate through the body. Was this Ricardo’s idea originally?

**Norbert Elias talks about aristocrats even as late as the 17th century in Spain who were expected to beggar themselves once every 10-15 years or so by hosting grand feasts for entire villages. After which, the cycle would begin again. This hosting/feasting was a crucial basis of their authority.

^Pageau has since walked back partially some of the “anti-science” approach he takes in this article. He has credited Jordan Peterson with helping him see some possible connections between science and the symbolic worldview.